RFID Rundown

Digitalisation is a big focus area, say we and pretty much everyone else these days.  Which makes plenty of sense, not just from a techie perspective.  Particularly in the Retail space, Ecommerce is the one channel that is still showing double-digit growth. But there’s more to Digital than webshops, and I’ll delve deeper by devoting the occasional column to other relevant Digital dilemmas.

I keep hearing about RFID? Are there real implications for my brand?  RFID is one of those relatively unsexy topics that generally only get my Logistics friends up out of their chairs.  Short for Radio Frequency Identification, what it means in the apparel world, is a small chip in the garment’s hangtag or another label, which enables a unique ID for that item – not the SKU, not the style/colour/fit/size (of which there can be hundreds of units), but that single, individual unit.

What would we get out of that?  Assuming that you had the production facility to make the labels and affix them to the garments, and invested in the tools, you could:

• Scan your inbound goods receipts a whole pallet at a time, more or less eliminating the need for pre-advice to the Warehouse Management System and ensuring full stock counts at inbound (this is where Logistics lights up)
• Perform stock counts in the shops, using a “wand” that picks up the radio frequencies (this is where Retail lights up)
• Some business are experimenting with tracking the movements of the garment around the shop.  How often did it get picked up?  How often did it go into the fitting room?

Sounds great! I’ll take two…  Well, it’s not quite that simple.  Some considerations, just to get started:

• There are many kinds of RFID chips, and the technology has been improving yearly.  Nevertheless, the accuracy of pallet-scanners on boxes as tightly packed as some of ours, is so far not 100% reliable (based on references during WMS project investigations)
• Did someone say GDPR?  There has been controversy in certain countries, about business’ use of tracking movements of the garments after consumer purchase.  An important consideration therefore, is de-activation of the chip when it leaves the shop premises.
• Not to mention, that you can only harvest these benefits, once you have invested in the relevant hardware and software to manage them.

What else is happening in the world of unique product IDs?

• NFC (Near Field Communication) tags can be made super-thin and discreet – but can only be read at close range, and therefore don’t enable the “inventory by wand” solutions.
• Several players like Verisium are playing with using Blockchain to register tagged raw materials such as organic cotton,

Some say RFID is already dying, others say it’s in it’s infancy.   Blockchain technology is bringing new opportunities in the form of massive data processing power, to handle the huge volume of potentially trackable movements and transactions per unit.